


A Good Year

by xaara



Category: Breakfast with Scot (2007)
Genre: Compulsory Heterosexuality, Hockey, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Other: See Story Notes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:41:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21747691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xaara/pseuds/xaara
Summary: Eric grows up.
Relationships: Eric McNally/Other(s), Eric McNally/Sam Miller
Comments: 39
Kudos: 71
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	A Good Year

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coyotesuspect](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coyotesuspect/gifts).



> This includes one vaguely referenced sexual encounter between two 16-year-olds. Also: references to hazing, hockey violence, alcohol consumption, casual misogyny, and language. References to period-appropriate events/issues including HIV/AIDS, the September 11 terrorist attacks, and some very bad Toronto Maple Leafs seasons. My experience is different than yours. Please let me know in the comments if you need more information before approaching this story.
> 
> Thank you for the prompt(s)! I had never watched or heard of this movie until a month ago, and now there’s this.
> 
> See end notes for minor discussion of canon and setting.

He’s five. He hasn’t learned to stop. Mostly he gets to the end of the rink and that does the stopping for him. He slams into the boards, gets up, and takes off in the other direction.

He’s faster than the other kids. He doesn’t want to take big round laps. He wants to _go._ He skates until he’s panting, until his chest burns. They lumber after him, but he’s faster, he’s going to be faster.

He crashes. Gets up. Crashes again.

“Eric,” Coach calls finally. “Enough, McNally, Jesus,” and he shows Eric how to turn his blades sideways, how to dig his edges in just enough to shave the ice and bleed off speed.

He’s seven and he skates circles—sometimes, literally, circles—around his teammates. He’s a shit. They tell him as much. They use other words. He repeats one of them at home, and his mom looks disappointed and his dad says, “Not in the house, Eric, we don’t talk about those people,” so he doesn’t say it again. At least, not in the house.

He gets stuffed into a locker, twice. An older boy spits on him and makes him put on his pads without wiping the spit off. The spot burns against his skin, all through practice. Afterwards, he scrubs but can’t tell exactly where it was. It’s gotten so mixed in with his sweat.

He’s twelve, and there are itchy pimples on his shoulders and under his chin. He can feel them coming for days before they arrive, but nothing he does makes them come any faster. They just get there when they get there.

The other boys talk about girls. They’re more talk than action and he thinks they all know it. Twelve-year-old girls won’t give them the time of day. Older girls think they’re cute in the way they think puppies are cute, or the big-eyed rainforest animals they all want to write reports on. Eric doesn’t care about girls. He’s got bigger problems. He’s more concerned about the fact that the Leafs are looking like they aren’t even going to make the playoffs, while the fucking Habs are tearing up the Adams Division. Which sucks, okay? If the Leafs have to lose like ten in a row, the Habs should collectively fall off a cliff. That’s cosmic justice or karma or something, he’s pretty sure. And he’s going to get drafted to the Leafs one day. He’s way better than those other losers who call themselves hockey players. They play because every kid in the GTA plays hockey. He plays because he’s good at it. He plays because he loves it. It's in his blood.

He’s twelve and there are rules in the dressing room now. You don’t look, but you don’t not-look, because either extreme gets you fucked up. Eyes above the neck. You don’t talk about what happens to the rookies. You were a rookie, and you’re about to be a rookie again once you move up, so you keep your mouth shut. Or you open your mouth, sometimes, when they tell you to. He’s eaten a lot of weird shit. For a while, there’s a kid that everyone decides is gay. Once, Eric walks in on him and some of the others. The kid’s on the floor. Eric backs out of the room. He tells the coach he feels sick, which is true. His mom looks at him funny when he comes home early, but he says, “I think I’m getting the flu,” the lie easy. He’s lied about worse things, like— Well. There are lies, is the point, and it’s okay, because he would know if it went too far, probably. This is just team, and team is a violent kind of love. Rib-rattling celebrations, jumping into each other. Soft touches are for—he’s not allowed to say it in the house.

He plays hockey. You can’t be both. He plays hockey.

He’s sixteen and billeted in Kingston, which could be worse. He could be in Sault Ste. Marie or wherever and have to drive ten hours not to be in the middle of nowhere. He could have to spend his entire godforsaken life on a bus. His billet mom is okay, and his billet dad is comfortably absent most of the time. There’s another kid in the house. His name is Paul. He’s seventeen and shows Eric everything to do in Kingston, which isn’t much, especially not without a car. Mostly they wander around and try not to freeze. They look at the prison. A man escaped from there a year or two ago, and it was exciting for a minute, but then they caught him again. They stuffed him right back in. All that work, all that planning, and he got out for a day. He had to have known he wouldn’t get far. What was he going to do, swim across the St. Lawrence? There wasn’t anywhere to go.

“You wanna go to the fort?” Paul asks, and it’s not like Eric has anything better to do. He hasn’t turned in more homework than strictly, 100% necessary in two years. You can only skate so many hours a day before they kick you off the ice. There are more girls, now, but the other boys either treat them like shit or think they’re, like, in _love_ with them and want to buy them stuff all the time. Eric keeps waiting to get it.

At the fort, there are cannons and bricks, the stuff you’d expect to see. Then, they walk past these doors that—Eric’s never seen anything like them. They’re huge. Massive beams of wood anchored together with metal bolts as thick as his fingers. It’s like a castle. It’s the kind of place where you could bring in your whole village, all the women and kids and chickens or whatever, and wait out a siege.

“These doors are amazing,” says Eric. Paul shrugs: they’re just doors. Eric can’t figure out exactly what he’s trying to say. “You know how hard it would be to get through these? Like, you could shoot a cannonball at them and it’d bounce right off.”

Paul looks at the doors, assessing. “I mean, it’s a fort,” he says.

Eric feels a bite of frustration. Paul should get this. The doors are important. Someone thought about all the things that could come and get you, could kill you, could overrun you, and they said: not here, and built the giant doors like they meant it.

“They were safe inside,” says Eric, though he doesn’t know if that’s true. Was there a battle here? He looks around for someone to ask.

Paul’s examining the doors again. He strokes one with his hand, dragging his finger over the raised ends of the bolts. Eric isn’t sure if you’re allowed to touch the doors, because aren’t they almost two centuries old? Nothing lasts that long. He got a new t-shirt last week and it already has a hole in it. Somewhere he heard that the oils from people’s hands can damage old things, which makes sense, because people are grabby and not careful. What if Paul touches the door and it disintegrates?

But it doesn’t. Paul touches the door and it keeps being a door that looks like an elephant couldn’t get through it. “Huh,” he says. “I guess it is a pretty big set of doors.”

“That’s what I was saying,” says Eric. He wasn’t quite saying that, but it’s close enough.

They wander around the fort, reading plaques. Just before noon, a little excitement builds. People start to gather. A mom drags her—three-year-old? Six-year old? Eric never had younger siblings; he’s bad with ages. The kid levels big, furious eyes at Eric and lets his whole body go limp. The mom staggers a few steps toward the dead weight attached to her arm. She leans down to hiss something at the kid. He starts crying. Eric turns away.

It turns out that the excitement is about the cannons, which some guys dressed up in uniforms are about to fire. The soldiers wear weird flat hats with a stripe around them, and pants with a red stripe down the sides. He can see the gleaming buttons on their jackets from twenty meters away. They’re wearing gloves, which seems pointless, because if you put your hand in front of a cannon you’re going to lose that hand. But maybe it’s just uniform. It makes all their hands the same hands.

When the cannons fire, Eric catches the sound it in his ribs like a hit. His heart races. Another one: like when you’re in a thunderstorm and the lightning streaks just above you, so close there’s no space until the thunder. Rattling the windows. He closes his eyes. He wants to scream. If he timed it just right, you wouldn’t be able to hear. Big sounds fit inside bigger sounds like that. He screams when he scores sometimes, nesting it inside the horn.

Afterwards, he and Paul stop at Timmy’s for coffee. Eric wraps his hands around the cup to thaw his fingers. He can’t stop thinking about the cannons. What would happen if you got hit by a cannonball? Just rip your guts out and just keep going. You wouldn’t even slow it down. 

They walk back together. Paul’s got a friend to see in the afternoon, but he doesn’t seem like he’s in a hurry. He bumps against Eric’s shoulder, which Eric thinks is an accident until he does it again. Goosebumps rise where their arms touch. Paul’s warm. “Thanks for coming with me,” Paul says when they get to his room. Eric sprawls on the floor. He pokes at a bruise on his hip while Paul fiddles with the radio. Annie Lennox is singing about broken glass again. The bruise hurts, but not too bad. He’s had way worse.

“It was fun,” says Eric.

Paul sits on the floor next to him. “We’ve billeted a lot of hockey players,” he says, scratching fingers into the carpet. It sends up a puff of dust. Paul’s mom would yell if she knew he just turned on the vacuum and let it run in the corner for ten minutes instead of actually vacuuming. Eric’s not going to tell.

“Yeah?” Eric’s not listening. He’s not paying attention. Then Paul puts a hand on his shoulder, and his whole body is paying attention. He’s never paid more attention to anything in his life.

“Hey, don’t punch me,” says Paul, and kisses him.

It’s not like—Eric has kissed people, okay? Girls. There was this one girl in Toronto the last summer when he was sixteen who looked him up and down at a party and shrugged. He figured that meant he was good enough, and he was right. They made out against a stairwell and he even put a hand inside her shirt but he wasn’t sure what to do next. Sonny had said that his girlfriend wore this bra that was basically impossible to get off without a degree in rocket science, and Eric didn’t want to try that, in the darkness, four beers in. Eventually she put her hand on his ass, which was fine with him, but then she tried to put the other hand down the front of his pants. He squirmed away. She frowned and followed him. “Nah,” he said, “too much beer,” which sounded plausible. “Do me,” she said, and he could do that. He could follow directions. He’d been following directions his whole life.

The point is, it’s not like Eric’s some complete novice. But Paul doesn’t move like a girl. He doesn’t smell like a girl. Girls do some magic that keeps their lips soft, but Paul’s are chapped and there’s the vaguest hint of a mustache trying to hang on under his nose. He tastes like coffee. His whole body is tense, like he’s bracing for something.

Eric shoves him away. He’s breathing like he just got off the ice after back-to-back PKs. He doesn’t know what to do with his body that wants to lean back towards Paul. This isn’t—you can’t be both. Paul looks at him carefully, then wraps his arms around folded knees, tucking himself against the bed. “Sorry,” he says. “Sorry, I thought— I won’t do it again.”

“You’d better not,” says Eric. “What the fuck, did you think I was—” but he stops, because Paul is shaking a little, and Eric’s not—he’s not _like_ that, he doesn’t make people scared of him. Not out here, where it’s real. There are words he's not allowed to say in the house.

He peels himself up off the floor. He can't get his breathing under control. In his room, he closes the door and sits on his bed. What was Paul thinking, doing that? Eric isn’t, he’s not— Paul’s hands had been very strong. Eric wasn’t afraid of breaking him, the way he’s sometimes afraid of breaking the girls who flutter around the rink like trapped birds. Paul’s bigger than Eric, but whatever, Eric is sixteen, he’ll grow. Right now, Paul could probably hold him down.

That’s—

He pauses, listens. The wall between their rooms isn’t thick, so he can still hear Annie Lennox. Paul isn’t moving around much, or if he is, Eric can’t hear him. He imagines what it would be like, to have Paul’s hands on his wrists. The warm palms, short fingernails. Paul’s in his room right now, maybe still sitting on the floor. If Eric went back in there— What? He tries thinking it: _I’m a._ But his brain stutters, like the cells won’t talk across the distance between the being and the name.

He wants to scream.

He scores a hatty in the game the next day, and he screams there, but it’s not the same. Screaming only feels good if it’s not allowed. If it’s not expected. After the third goal, his teammates crash into him and loop him into a hug. Sonny slings an arm around Eric and tilts a head onto his shoulder while the ice crew shovels the hats off the rink. Eric’s been on the ice for over a minute, which is probably why he’s gasping for breath like a beached fish. The ice crew piles the hats up into drifts. There’s a lot of white and blue, a decent number of red and black. It’s Ottawa’s first season. He’s kind of impressed by the number of people who already have hats. He thinks about hats and breathes. Breathes.

In the dressing room, Sonny says, “Way to go, Naller, leave some for the rest of us, eh?” He claps Eric on the back before finding his stall to strip off his pads.

Eric smiles like he’s supposed to. Sonny’s got an A and is more decent than most of the kids Eric’s known with one. He doesn’t give Eric shit all the time, and he doesn’t call him Erica, even if he laughs when the other boys do.

Doughy elbows him in the side. “Four point night, baby, we’re getting you laid.”

Hams whoops across the room. “Get some, Naller!”

“Fuck all of you,” says Eric, grinning, and regrets it immediately when Blanket says, “You wish.” He doesn’t mean anything by it. Probably. Just the same kind of stuff they say all the time. Eric’s grin freezes. He rips open some velcro so he has an excuse to look away. There isn’t even a pause in the chatter around him. They didn’t notice. They don't—however it was that Paul knew, they don't know.

There’s a conversation to his left, about which kids in the O are hacking it this year. About which ones are—“Mitchell’s a beast,” says Sonny admiringly. “You see him lay that hit on Lefebvre last week?”

“Yeah,” says Hills. He sees Eric watching and raises his voice. “Not like our delicate Erica.” He looks at Eric, daring him to start something.

“Fuck off,” says Sonny. “You get more than two minutes of ice time, you can say anything you want.”

Eric's face heats. He fights it down.

In the showers and after, he’s quiet. He doesn’t have anything to say. Doughy’s assessment of his ability to get Eric (or any of them) laid always puts his odds way higher than reality. He’s lucky if girls will even talk to them, much less do anything else. And the other—if anyone finds out, hockey's done. Maybe more than hockey. The kid who was on the floor was gone the next day. Eric never saw him again. He doesn’t remember his name. And Eric’s not stupid, he reads sometimes, and fuck if he’s going to go on TV like Magic Johnson and look at all those faces looking back at him and tell them, or be like Freddie Mercury, admit it one day and be dead the next—

There are two years of this. Three, if he doesn’t get drafted right away. He wants people to say stuff like Sonny's saying about him: that he’s a beast. You aren’t both. Erica isn’t a beast. Eric’s not naive, like some of the other boys who think they’re going to be stars because a few people in Kingston recognize them on the street. He knows he doesn’t have the softest hands or best hockey sense. He’s not going to go first-round, or even second. But there are always teams looking for someone with different skills that they can train up.

Next game, he scans the other team’s bench. It's the usual suspects: a few rookies bouncing their knees, a handful of 19-year-olds riding their last chance. He picks a big one, number 74. When they share the ice, Eric shoulders into him behind the play. He cross-checks him when the stripes aren’t looking. It’s a slash that does it, a fast one as he's skating into position before the puck drops, and then the puck is dropping and gloves are dropping right after it.

He gets five and sits in the box blinking through the ringing in his head. He checks his teeth with his tongue. One of the front ones feels loose. He wiggles it with a finger. Definitely loose. 74 is sitting in the other box, leaning back against the glass. His nose is bleeding sluggishly. Eric looks down at his hands. He slides his gloves back on. He watches the clock tick down.

He’s eighteen. He goes late in the third to the Leafs. He has about twenty minutes to be happy about it before they dump him back in Juniors. The Leafs only play half a season anyway before they lose to the Blackhawks, so maybe it’s for the best. He spends another year in Juniors. The Leafs play a full 82 this time but lose the first series again, this time to the Blues. That year, the Avs take it all. Joe Sakic blows everyone else out of the water. Claude Lemieux gets suspended two games for breaking Kris Draper’s face, but the Avs don’t miss a beat. Not even the Panthers fans raining plastic rats onto the ice fazes them. They sweep the finals. Sakic hoists the Cup over his head and beams.

Eric can taste it. It would be cool to the touch at first, and then warm up as it was passed from player to player. It would get slippery with sweat, all those hands on it. He’d raise it, the rings of names welcoming him.

He’s twenty. He goes to camp. He works his ass off. He finishes checks. He gets in trouble for elbowing some kid from Jersey in the head. When the smoke clears and he’s mumbled apologies to everyone from Colin Campbell at Ops all the way down to the old lady neighbor who tsks at him and says, “Now, Eric, I know you boys play rough, but you can play fair too,” he’s on the team.

He’s on the team. It’s right there on paper. Three years, two-way. But he’s not going the second way. He’s going to stay out of St. John’s if it kills him.

He plays hockey.

—

Now that they’re not sixteen and more acne than sense, it’s easier to get girls to pay attention. Money helps, too. Eric buys a car. He rents a one-bedroom apartment in the city, and buys someone else’s taste to decorate it. He buys three suits that he can rotate on game days. He buys drinks and steaks. He can’t buy a win, but to be fair, neither can the rest of the team.

Tommy wants to take him up north where they can go shooting, and Tommy might be his D-partner but he’s kind of an asshole, so Eric says no. Tommy says, “What else are you doing, it’s not like you got a girlfriend,” and Eric doesn’t have a good answer to that. He spends more time hanging out with the team and thinks about what he’d have to buy to get a girl to like him. Flowers. Like, roses? Or jewelry. Girls like that shit.

He dates a Jessica for a while. She’s beautiful. She has this long straight hair that looks brown at first until you notice it’s kind of red underneath. He likes kissing her because she doesn’t ask for much. She makes little noises as she falls asleep. She wears shirts that don’t go all the way down to her pants, and tiny chain belts that can’t be holding anything up. She has a friend named Cassie, and sometimes the three of them get drunk together and sleep together and wake up together. He likes watching the two of them make out. They both seem really into it. He’s kind of jealous of how girls get to be into that kind of stuff, because guys think it’s sexy. Like, if he kissed someone who wasn’t a girl— Whatever. He’s not going to. But Jessica and Cassie make out with each other and then he gets to use his mouth on them and make them say, “Oh my God” and grab his hair.

He tries talking to Tommy about it one time, but Tommy says, “You eat pussy?” and makes a face like it’s gross. Eric didn’t know what he expected; he already knew Tommy was a jerk. It’s not gross. He gets to put his hands on the inside parts of their thighs, right where they nudge up against bone. Sometimes they missed a spot shaving and there’s delicate hair there under his fingers. He gets to close his eyes and feel the way everything gets softer and wetter, the way they can’t stop their muscles from trembling. He gets to go a little to the left and a little lighter and a little faster, and he gets to listen to the sounds they make. They don’t need anything from him after.

“Might explain why none of your girlfriends ever last long,” he says to Tommy. He traces his fingers around the ring of a black eye. It’s his third so far this season, but he likes to think he’s gotten better at giving them, too.

Tommy takes a swig of his beer. “There’s more fish,” he says. He’s twenty-three and he’s been up for two years already. The Leafs are going to sign him at the end of the season: a real contract, real money. There are more fish.

Eric spends Christmas with his family. He doesn’t bring Jessica. They live in the same city and haven’t met, so it’s not a huge surprise when Jessica breaks up with him right before New Year’s. The Russian guys watch him mope around the dressing room for a day before Pez puts him in a headlock and says, “You spend New Year with us.” It’s not a question.

“Come on, man,” Tommy protests. “I’ve been here two and a half years. You never invite _me_ to weird Russian New Year’s.”

Pez shrugs. “You're little bit asshole,” he says, which, you know, Eric isn’t going to say _to Tommy._ Tommy’s grinning, though. Not like it’s news to him.

They don’t have a game until January 3, so the party has no place to be in the morning. The Russians drink more individually than any three people Eric's ever seen before. They seem to know every other Russian in Ontario. They touch each other a _lot._ Kids run around underfoot. There’s some kind of egg and potato salad thing and enough pickled stuff to feed an army. Everybody inhales caviar and speaks so quickly Eric can’t tell where words start and end. Someone shoves a plate into his hands. He takes a bite of what’s on it. It’s purple. And also, fish? He washes it down with some more champagne.

The night goes on. There’s dancing, and Eric is sure he looks like an idiot, but he can't bring himself to care. “S Novym godom!” Vitya roars at him, over earsplitting music, his hands on Eric’s shoulders.

“No voom go doom!” Eric yells back at Vitya’s stupid face.

Vitya laughs, throwing his head back. “No! Is terrible! S Novym godom!”

“Snow vum go dum!”

“Better!” Vitya is feeling the music now: some guy talk-singing in Russian over this fast synth-techno beat. Eric lets his body get a little loose too. They dance. All around them are people dancing. A new song comes on, or a new verse of the old one. It’s brain-meltingly loud. Eric could drown in it.

At some point, Pez gives Eric a scrap of paper. “You write here,” he says. “It’s—” he pauses, searching for the word. “Like, new thing you want for a year.”

“A wish?”

“Wish!” says Pez. “Wish.”

Eric can’t think of anything. He has what he wants. He plays hockey. He does it for money, in front of people, in a Leafs sweater. The paper stays as blank as the inside of his head. The music cuts off and is replaced by a recording of bells, like from a church. Suddenly, Pez is back, holding a lit match up to the piece of paper in Eric’s hand. It catches, burns. Pez points to his own glass, where the ash of his wish is floating in the champagne. Eric drops his blank paper in. Pez drains his glass in a few quick swallows, so Eric does too. The bits of ash catch at the back of his throat. He’s coughing when the bells stop and the Russian anthem blasts out of the speakers instead. He’s heard it before, when a Soviet team kicks everyone else’s ass up and down the Olympics, but it’s different here. In this room, everyone is singing along. Not church-singing, where people kind of mumble and fake like they know the melody, but real singing: whole big lungfuls of notes.

He didn’t make a wish. Maybe he can still— _A good year?_ he thinks, tentatively. Then: _a good year._

The anthem goes on and on. O Canada is like half this long. Even when they play games in the States and have to listen to both anthems, they don’t take this long put together. But it’s pretty, kind of sad and powerful at the same time. He gets the hang of the tune after a couple rounds and sings along, open-throated.

Late, he winds up sprawled on the couch with Vitya. Vitya takes a long drink of something that should be water and probably isn’t. The room is warm and spinning at the edges. Eric decides he doesn’t mind. “What did you wish?” he asks.

“I’m not telling you,” says Vitya.

“C’mon,” says Eric, pushing his heel into Vitya’s thigh. “I won’t tell anybody.”

“No. It's for me.” Vitya lays his head back on the top of the couch and lets out a sigh. His hand drops down onto Eric's ankle. He was smiling a minute ago, but he doesn’t seem happy. “It's good night,” he says, “just…far from home.”

Eric thinks about it. Never seeing his family. Only talking to them once or twice a month. Living among people who didn’t speak your language and weren’t going to try, who turned around and shoved a camera in your face and expected you to speak theirs. “Do you wish you’d done something else?”

“I play hockey,” says Vitya. “It's not too bad. Not like Mogilny, he comes, not knowing he ever goes back.” He squeezes Eric's ankle and tips back the rest of his drink.

Mogilny might be burning his own wish in Vancouver right now. Eric wonders what it is. He probably wants to be home, too. What does he think of as home? The Russians always seem so relaxed about the Soviet Union dissolving. Eric thinks he’d be more stressed if Canada were suddenly ten different countries and he lived in the Democratic Republic of Ontario or whatever.

Maybe he can bring some home here. “S Novym godom,” he says. It doesn't sound bad.

Vitya cackles, which—Russian is _hard,_ okay? “No, now you say: S Novym schastyem.”

“No, dude.” He failed French and managed to make it out of high school anyway, he's definitely not trying Russian.

Vitya slaps Eric's shin, and Eric yanks his leg back, shaking off the sting. “Good, I teach you chirps for other Russians,” Vitya says.

Eric’s pretty sure what he learns isn’t a chirp, because he tries it out in Detroit to get the most bang for his buck and three guys laugh at him, and then they repeat it while pointing at him and the other two join in.

“What the hell, Vitya,” Eric hisses.

“Maybe you say it wrong,” Vitya says. He’s trying not to smile, and failing hard. “Say again.”

“No,” says Eric. He’s not going to fucking say it again.

One of the Detroit players mutters at Pez as he skates past the bench, jerking his chin towards Eric. Pez buries his face in his gloves. “I can see you laughing, asshole!” Eric yells at him.

And okay, they don’t win, but they don’t lose. They most likely aren’t going to make the playoffs but they’re coming off a couple of wins in a row and it feels good. Eric will celebrate another birthday in a week, the one that means he can drink even when they play roadies in the States. Maybe there are some good things coming.

He’s twenty-one and Tommy’s shouting, “Birthday _boy!_ ” from his stall across the room. They just lost, which doesn’t seem to dampen Tommy’s enthusiasm any. It makes a kind of sense. If losing dampened everyone’s enthusiasm, the team would basically never get out of bed.

“Drinks tonight,” says Tommy. He throws a crumpled-up sock in Eric’s direction. Eric gets out of the way in a hurry.

“Drinks,” Eric agrees before any more of Tommy’s foot fungus can come flying at him.

Netter, who doesn’t have one of the As because he fucks around, says, “Don’t throw socks, Tommy, that shit is nasty.”

“Okay if I invite Sam?” says Wardo, unlacing his skates.

Tommy throws his other sock at Netter, who gets up and starts heading towards him. Tommy’s going to get fucking murdered. “Sure, whatever, we’re going to a place with a VIP room, I already set it up,” Tommy says, and hustles for an exit.

A couple of cars full of them wind up at The 416. It’s the kind of place where the walls have weird shifting light colors on them. The bartenders roll their eyes and look like they’re thinking about hiding the shot glasses when they see hockey players walk in. There are men in suits sitting at the bar, and Eric feels underdressed for a minute, which—he’s wearing his gameday suit, he’s not underdressed.

“Hey, Benjamin,” says one of the guys at the bar. Eric doesn’t pay much attention until he sees the guy looking at Wardo and Wardo looking back. Benjamin?

“Your name is Benjamin?” Tommy is saying, like it’s the most hilarious thing he’s ever heard, and Wardo is saying, “What the fuck did you think Ben was short for, _Thomas?_ ” and Eric’s pretty sure they’re all about to get kicked out. It wouldn't be the first time.

“Sorry, man,” says the guy. He has big hands with long fingers and his eyes are very warm. “Didn’t know your name was such a state secret.”

Wardo slaps Tommy on the back of the head. “Only to idiots. Sam, these are the idiots. Idiots, Sam.”

“Nice to meet you, Samuel!” someone shouts from the back, as someone else adds, “Samson, my man!” which is exactly the kind of nonsense they need. Tommy beams. He loves it.

“Shut up,” grumbles Wardo, and goes to find them a place to sit. They all wedge themselves into the four VIP room tables and order pitchers of beer. Eric’s surprised a place like this has pitchers of beer. It seems like the kind of bar where you’d order a martini or something, and roll up your cuffs and dramatically loosen your shirt collar. He wouldn't be surprised if they sent somebody to the store to buy the pitchers when they heard Tommy on the phone. Their legs don't fit under the table and end up in a tangle of feet. Half of Eric's bruises are from being kicked by his asshole teammates. Everyone seems to have forgotten it’s his birthday. It’s all right with him. He’d just as soon eat a burger and go home.

Eric winds up at a table with Tommy and Vitya and Wardo, and Sam, who Wardo apparently knows from university. Wardo did two years, which is a year more than anybody else on the team. Sam did four years, which you have to do to graduate, and is now, of his own free will, doing more.

“Law school?” asks Eric. “Why?” He meant to ask a question more like, _what drew you to the practice of law,_ but you know, it’s not like he went to university. Or high school, really.

Sam smiles. He has a nice smile. It’s small, but his eyes crinkle. He looks like he’s seeing you. “I’m good at it,” he says. He looks down, then looks back up again, and this time his smile is tighter at the corners. “My boyfriend moved to Toronto for work and I had applications in for a couple of postgrad options, so I took this one. We broke up, but I’d already committed, so.” His shoulders are tense. Eric thinks about how Sam waved the rest of them around the table so he’d be the closest one to the door.

He needs to— “Hey, cool,” he says. His voice is too high. His stupid—he drops it back down. “What kind of law?” Vitya shifts in his seat and Tommy looks away.

Sam’s shoulders relax just a little. “Sports,” he says. “I played lacrosse through school, and I got to know a bunch of the other athletes,” he tilts his head towards Wardo, “but I’m not going to be playing anything professionally.”

“What’s sports law?” asks Eric. Wardo looks at him like he’s sprouted a second head. Even Tommy raises an eyebrow.

“Something you should probably know more about,” says Sam. He pours himself a beer. He hadn’t before, because, Eric thinks, he wasn’t sure if he was staying. He’s staying.

He stays. They talk about law school, which sounds like about the worst thing you could do to yourself, even including the existence in the world of a half-hour bag skate. A couple minutes in, Vitya, who’s been quiet, excuses himself and goes to find another table. Eric's stomach goes sour. He wonders if Sam notices, too. He wishes he knew a secret handshake, or Morse code or something. Something to tell Sam: _Not just you._ He wonders if Sam feels this way in his gut when people’s eyes change to that mix of pity and disgust, the way Eric imagines people look at broken-legged horses. Eric’s never— Paul knew, somehow, and it’s not like Eric’s been obsessed with figuring out what tipped him off, but maybe he’s buried it deeper under his pads, like in the kind of a place your lungs are. In a cage, safe.

If Sam notices, he’s doesn’t show it. They talk about Tommy’s season (fair), Wardo’s season (good), and the Leafs’ season (which he’d rather not). Eric’s on pace for around 100 penalty minutes, which isn’t bad for someone who sees the ice twelve minutes a game. They love him on _Hockey Night._ It’s not like he never scores, either. He’s got six goals to his name, a handful of apples.

“I hear you’re going to set the rookie penalty record,” says Sam, who has very long eyelashes. He’s had half a beer and his cheeks are pinker than they used to be.

“I like a good fight,” says Eric. “Everybody likes a good fight.”

“Our baby, all grown up and punching people in the face,” says Tommy, whose eyebrows just about shoot into his hairline when he visibly remembers it’s Eric’s birthday. “All grown up!” he says, and waves at one of the waitresses. “We need a birthday cake,” he whispers to her, like this place is going to magically produce one.

“Happy birthday,” says Sam. He’s smiling one of his small smiles again. Eric doesn’t want to stop looking at him. He doesn’t have to. It’s his birthday.

The restaurant does magically produce a birthday cake, or at least they go get a piece of cake out of the back and stick some candles in it. Tommy hits the pitcher of beer a few times with a fork. “Listen up,” he shouts when the thunking fails to get anyone’s attention. He stands and drags Eric up to stand beside him, an arm over Eric's shoulders. “It is the birthday of one Eric McNally today, number 25. Little rookie, big attitude. Reserved spot in the box and on Coach’s shit list because he keeps going to the box from the D-zone. He is twenty-one, which means he is now responsible for his own fucking drinks, even in the States. Let us sing!”

They sing. Eric survives, and then he gets to blow out his candles. He remembers the way the ash at New Year’s caught in his throat and sneaks a glance at Vitya, but Vitya’s not looking. He gets to make a wish. He’s not sure whether the wish he swallowed counted because he didn’t write it, only thought it. So, for insurance, he thinks it again— _a good year_ —and blows out his candles.

The cake’s not bad. They sit and drink for a while. Eric’s had two beers and is fuzzy and content. If he watched a movie he’d fall asleep.

The married guys start to peel off, and then the responsible ones. After a bit, it’s just Eric’s table left. “I’m gonna pee,” says Sam. He stretches when he stands. Eric’s eyes follow him.

A minute after Sam leaves, Eric says, “I’m gonna,” and jerks a thumb towards the washrooms.

“Sure,” says Tommy, who is telling Wardo a story about a girl he met back home in Saskatchewan. Like they need the reminder that he’s from the woods.

Inside the washroom, there are real lights, like lamps. The mirrors are round, and the sinks have glass containers of carefully folded paper towels next to them. Sam’s washing his hands. Eric goes to the other sink and washes his hands too. The towels are ridiculously soft. They're like cloth. He didn’t know they could make paper towels so soft.

He can't think of what to say. He came here to—what? “Sorry about your boyfriend,” he says, and immediately wants the ground to swallow him.

Sam looks confused, which, fair. But he’s nice about it. “Thanks, man,” he says. “But it was a while back, and it turns out I really like it here, so.”

“You date other guys?” Eric’s hands feel wet, even though he just dried them. He grabs another paper towel. He should ask where they order them.

“Yeah.” Sam looks less confused and more wary, now. “I date other guys.”

“Oh,” says Eric. “Okay, well.” He throws the paper towel towards the trash and misses, which means he has to fish it out from under the sink and try again. His face is burning when he gets back up. For some reason, Sam is still standing there. He looks at Eric’s reflection in the mirror the way Wardo looks at crossword puzzles.

“I’m not dating anybody right now.” Sam’s body is saying something. Eric sees it from both sides, from behind and reflected in the mirror, the way Sam’s shoulders creep up towards his ears. He doesn’t know what it means.

“Hey,” Eric says, nonsensically, “it’s my birthday,” and Sam whirls around and they’re kissing there, in the washroom of the 416. Eric makes an embarrassing noise. He knows what you’re supposed to do when you kiss, which is be considerate and keep your hands in slow-dance zones. He doesn’t want to do that. He wants to push Sam into the wall and yank on his shirt collar and dig fingers into his hair. He wants to nose up under Sam’s jaw where—and he can, so he does it—his lips scrape stubble, which—

The door opens. Sam moves quicker than anyone Eric’s ever seen, like a rabbit. He has the water on and is washing his hands again by the time Tommy is over at the urinal. By the time Tommy’s done, Sam’s gone. Eric stands, frozen, at the sink. His heart is beating way too fast.

Tommy zips up and wipes his hands on his pants. He catches Eric’s eye in the mirror and nods. Then his eyes come back and narrow. Eric looks down at the sink. He shivers. His shirt is half-untucked in the front. Anything he says is going to give him away.

“Dude,” says Tommy, slowly, “what was—” but Eric doesn’t hear the end of the sentence, because he’s out of the washroom, out of the restaurant, around the corner hailing a taxi. In the back of the car, he breathes a lot. He feels drunker than he should. Tommy’s not stupid. Well, not this stupid. It’s not like it wasn’t obvious what they were doing. And Tommy’s never said anything, or nothing worse than what everybody says, but what everybody says is plenty bad. He’s going to tell Netter, and Netter’s going to tell the other As, and they’re going to tell the coaches, and they’ll send him to fucking _Newfoundland,_ which is an _island_ full of fucking _moose,_ where it freezes, like, ten months out of the year, or they won’t even bother sending him down, they’ll just find him in breach of some part of his contract and he’ll sit in a room with a bunch of old men in suits and they’ll say awkward things and look at each other meaningfully and then they’ll shake his hand and that’ll be it.

“You okay, man?” says the taxi driver. He looks like he wants to stop at a police station instead of taking Eric home. “You gonna throw up, you tell me.”

“I’m okay,” Eric says. He’s—he’ll call Tommy. Explain that Sam kissed him, that he hadn’t wanted it, that he wasn’t—that way. Even as he’s thinking it he sees Sam’s shoulders, coming up to protect him. Sam, making sure he’s closest to the door in a room full of hockey players. The way he said, “my boyfriend” and his voice didn’t even creak. Just said it like that, where anybody could hear him. He wanted people to hear him. It was the stupidest thing Eric’s ever seen someone do.

So, he’ll say it was a joke. Like, it’s Eric’s birthday, so he wanted a birthday kiss and wasn’t going to get one in a room full of his teammates. Not so different from kissing a girl. Faces are faces. That should do it. He’ll tell him at practice tomorrow.

Somehow, he gets home. He sleeps. He wakes up. They have a morning practice, and then they’re flying down to Florida the next day. When Eric walks into the dressing room, Tommy is talking to one of the equipment guys. Vitya’s lacing his skates. Netter doesn’t say anything, which is never a good sign. Everyone knows, probably. Everyone can, like, smell it on him.

Tommy sits down beside Eric, even though it’s not his stall. Eric does not jump. His whole body is vibrating, like he had three too many cups of coffee. Tommy bumps shoulders with him. He’s about to say something. He’s going to, and then—but all Tommy says is, “Gonna kick ass at practice today?”

“Yeah,” says Eric. His voice cracks. He clears his throat and says it again: “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” echoes Tommy, and elbows him one more time before the actual stall’s owner throws a ball of tape at him.

—

He’s twenty-one, and he doesn’t get sent to Newfoundland.

He plays hockey. He’s good at it. They finish the season 30-44-8, dead last in the division. Eric has 108 penalty minutes, which is apparently a league record for a rookie, but he backs it up with 16 points, which isn’t bad.

He watches TV. He trains, and eats, and sleeps. Sometimes his mom comes to visit and looks at his apartment with eyes that see right through the walls. “You should put up some art,” she says. He puts up a poster of a landscape. It’s Ireland or somewhere. Green, and more green. His mom eyes it when she comes back and says, “You could at least get a frame. What’s a nice girl going to think when you bring her back here?”

After the free agents settle in July, Wardo gets traded to St. Louis. Wardo learns about it on a camping trip in BC. “What the fuck,” he’s saying over a very poor connection. Eric hears about every fourth sound: _Wh f k._ Wardo says something else about having to fly all the way across the country only to move to a new one.

“I can box up your stuff,” says Eric. He’s not sure how much of that Wardo got.

“No,” says Wardo, then some static, then, “Sam.”

Eric doesn’t drop the phone. He might bobble it a little.

“Call me when you know your flight,” he says. Then he yells, “Flight!” for good measure and hangs up. He hasn’t thought about Sam since— Well. No need to put labels on things.

And it turns out that it doesn’t matter, because he doesn’t see Sam. Sam organizes everything. He calls the movers and gets Wardo’s life boxed up while Wardo finishes his vacation. They don’t need Eric.

At his going-away barbecue, Wardo toasts the things he’s going to miss about Toronto, starting with how none of the fucking through-streets are open in the summers and ending with sushi pizza. It takes him five beers to get through the list. Eric sits on a wicker outdoor couch on Wardo’s patio, which he’s leaving because it’s apparently more trouble to ship it than just get a new one. He’s staying with one of the Blues while he looks for a house anyway. Eric still can’t quite wrap his mind around it. He doesn’t ever want to leave Toronto. He wants to be in Toronto until he dies.

Someone ordered pizza, which they definitely need after consuming their body weight in grilled meat. Eric wanders inside. He wants a vegetable, or an apple, or maybe a banana. When he opens Wardo’s refrigerator, it’s empty. A lone orange sits on the counter. It’s hard to peel and the segments taste bitter, like the orange is mad it got picked. Where do you get oranges from in August? Halfway around the world. There are ships full, maybe. He pauses to imagine one of them capsizing. Oranges float, so you’d have just beaches full of oranges, like that beach in France where they keep finding Garfield phones.

“Naller!” says Wardo. “Nalls, Nallsy.” He staggers into the kitchen and opens the cabinet. It’s empty. He shrugs and ducks his head under the tap instead, taking long sips of water. He pulls up the hem of his shirt to wipe off his face. Eric hands him an orange segment. “This is a terrible orange,” Wardo says, holding out his hand for another.

“Sorry about St. Louis,” Eric says. He’s too tall for the counter and the edge is digging in just under his hip, but he doesn’t want to move.

“Me too,” says Wardo. For a minute, he looks sad—not like lost-a-game sad, not like out-6-to-8-weeks sad. Like real sad, the kind that gets stuck inside you. They’re quiet for a while.

“They’ll make the playoffs,” Eric tries when the silence starts to unnerve him. Wardo isn’t quite Tommy, but he’s not a quiet guy.

“Yeah,” Wardo says, then, “Sorry, that wasn’t what I came in here— I just— So, Tommy said—”

Eric looks out the window. In the backyard, the boys have set up some kind of game involving flowerpots and spoons. He thinks they’re flipping balled-up napkins into the pots. It looks fun. Someone screams, “Fuck off!” and there’s the sound of a flowerpot breaking.

“Whatever Tommy said was true,” Eric says. He keeps looking out the window. If he looks at Wardo and Wardo is giving him that broken-horse expression, he’s going to—

But Wardo isn’t. Wardo’s hugging him. They’re standing in the kitchen and Wardo has arms wrapped around him like he doesn’t know you’re not supposed to touch unless you have all your pads on. “I’m sorry,” says Wardo. “I should’ve—” Eric’s not sure what he thinks he should have done. What, held hands with Eric in the dressing room?

“Nah,” says Eric. He disentangles himself from the hug. “Go tear it up, man.” He doesn't see anywhere to get rid of the orange peel, so he just puts it in his pocket, where he finds it two days later. It still smells good.

—

So Wardo’s okay. It’s not like— Obviously Eric can’t—

Most of the boys wouldn’t be okay like that. Wardo went to university, so he’s weird. Eric only has a foggy idea of what people do at university. Read a lot. Talk about things. After he’s had a few beers, Wardo sometimes goes on long rambles about symbols and what sports mean. He’s into this Bart guy. Eric mostly ignores him.

But what if they didn’t have to be cool? What if Eric just...had some rules. Nobody needs to know. He can stop whenever.

He keeps dating women. It’s easy. They find him. They go out to restaurants where people see them together and sometimes their photos get leaked to the media. He holds their hands and asks them about their siblings. When they complain about their past boyfriends, he listens. They all call him sweet. He watches them try to find some reason to go on a third date with him. A couple of them make it that far. One even muscles through a few months before she can’t handle it anymore. When she dumps him, she looks at his face, but then her eyes kind of wander down to his crotch like she’s wondering what’s wrong with him. She’s gorgeous, obviously nothing is wrong with her.

He has other rules, too. No men in Toronto. Too many of them know his face. No men after a loss. No men in Calgary, or Edmonton, or Detroit. They don’t visit teams in the Eastern Conference very often, but he rules out Pittsburgh and Philly and Boston and Montreal.

The good news is that there are plenty of places he definitely won’t get spotted. No one’s ever recognized a single one of them in Phoenix. He’s not sure if the people there know they have a hockey team. Chicago and LA are big enough to get lost in. Dallas is in Texas, which isn’t ideal but he can work with.

He sleeps with Hugo in Arizona. Hugo is kind and funny and has very curly hair that crinkles under Eric’s fingers. He’s patient with the way Eric isn’t very good at blowing him and kind of gags a lot and also moves too much when Hugo returns the favor. He doesn’t mind that Eric has a curfew, or that he just wants to touch Hugo for a long time, or that he gets up afterwards and sits in the bathroom with the door closed until his hands stop shaking and he can take a full breath. Hugo makes both of them wear condoms for everything. In the most excruciating conversation of Eric’s life, he makes Eric promise to wear condoms with everyone else he sleeps with, too.

“I promise,” says Eric.

“And get tested,” says Hugo. “Often. By a doctor.”

“Jesus,” says Eric. He covers his face with a pillow. He wants pants on for this conversation, which is funny considering it’s mostly about dicks and also he just had Hugo’s in his mouth.

“I’m not kidding.” Hugo pulls the pillow away. Eric definitely wants to kiss him again. “I know you’re new at this shit, so consider this, like, your gay crash course.”

“I’m not gay,” Eric says. He’s not. He’s slept with girls. He’s—bisexual. That’s a thing.

Hugo looks skeptical, but he’s nice enough not to put words to the expression on his face. “It doesn’t matter if you’re gay.”

“Jesus,” Eric says again, “I already promised, okay?”

“Good,” says Hugo. For a minute it feels like he goes somewhere else, the way sometimes you look at an old person and they’re back in the war or whatever.

“Hey.” Eric puts his hands on Hugo’s face so that Hugo has to look at him instead of whatever he’s seeing, “I promise. I mean it.”

“Not even once,” says Hugo. His eyes are very blue. Sky blue. Not that thing that people call sky blue that’s too light, but the color of the sky on a clear day.

“Not even once,” Eric whispers, and Hugo turns his face so that his nose pushes into Eric’s palm, which shouldn’t be anything but is in fact so, so desperately hot that Eric forgets to breathe.

Hugo is laughing at him, but that’s a good thing, laughing at someone. Eric knows what to do with that. He thinks about his wish. Then he grins and gets his hand around the back of Hugo’s neck and tugs him down.

And he promised. So he sleeps with Phil in Chicago and Damon in New York and Clint in Dallas. He makes them all use condoms. He goes to a doctor in Oshawa every other month and has him swear every time that everything is private. The doctor doesn’t have a single piece of hockey memorabilia up anywhere in the office, so Eric even believes him.

Phil is kind of a tool and makes fun of Eric’s accent, which is rich coming from someone who pronounces every vowel like a sound you’d make at the dentist, and Damon is really into golf, which is boring, and Clint is—honestly, Eric forgets him almost as soon as he leaves. When the team goes back to Arizona he calls Hugo, but by the time they fly out there a third time Hugo has a boyfriend and they’re exclusive.

Eric and Tommy get bumped up to second pairing, and then, with really nothing to lose, to first. The season ends with them in last place in the division again, although they’re tenth instead of eleventh in the conference, so that’s good. That’s an improvement. In April, they do their exit interviews. They sucked, and now it’s time to tell God and everybody that they know it and they’re sorry for sucking and they’ll try not to suck so much next year. Then, they get to repeat it with the brass. Eric smiles and nods. He talks about being more effective in the corners and driving play through the neutral zone. They like his numbers and want him to get his majors down. “Fight smart,” says Coach. “We need you on the ice.”

Eric nods. “Yep.”

“Any dressing room issues we should know about?” asks the GM.

Eric shakes his head. “Nope.”

They scatter.

Vitya’s halfway back to Russia by now. Tommy’s on a plane to wherever you can get before you have to, like, portage to get to his hometown. Wardo’s coming up to visit for a couple of days soon. Eric doesn’t know what to do with himself. So he goes home.

“Hey, Ma,” he calls at the door, as if his parents are ever doing anything he should worry about interrupting. “Ma!”

“No need to shout,” she says, appearing in the hallway. She looks him over, the way she always has, the way that makes his insides shrivel up like a salted slug and then relax. “Staying for dinner?”

“Yeah.” They stand facing one another for a moment before he says, “I just figured, I’m done for a few weeks, I could help out—”

“Of course,” she says, and her face softens. “Do I get a hug first?”

She gets a hug. She gets trimmed bushes and edged grass and a back eavestrough reattached where it’s started to sag. When Eric’s up there he looks over the roof and mentally factors a replacement into next year’s budget. By the time he clambers down, his shirt is sticking to his armpits and dragging on his back. He needs a shower and a nap. Maybe a four-year nap, and when he wakes up the team’ll be good again and everyone will talk about how he’s some miraculous hockey player who used to be in a coma instead of a third-round pick that quarterbacks the second-worst power play in the League. He gets himself a beer. The refrigerator door sticks when he tries to close it. Then the refrigerator makes a sound like it just threw a rod. He takes a careful step back.

“Ma! You need a new fridge!” he yells to the house at large. He should measure it, and see if it’s a standard size or what. His eyes wander over the rest of the kitchen. They could just knock out the whole thing. They could get nice counters in here. What are nice counters made out of? Some kind of rock. “What kind of counters do you want?” he yells again.

“We’ve talked about this, Eric,” his mom says from behind him. He definitely doesn’t jump. “We’re very grateful for the mortgage payment, and the rest we can handle.”

She always says they aren’t going to have the argument again, but they’ve had it four times and a fifth one is simmering. Even making just above league minimum, Eric has more money than he knows what to do with. He has more money than anyone should know what to do with. His parents can at least have a refrigerator that doesn’t sound like it’s going to blow up and marble—that’s it, marble—countertops.

He lets it lie for now. They work companionably to get a salad together. He takes sips of his beer and she doesn’t comment on the fact that he reeks. He plays hockey. She's used to it. “So, are you seeing anyone?” she asks as she chops tomatoes. Eric, busy washing lettuce, does not drop any of it, but it’s a close thing.

“Nope,” he says.

“It’s been a long time since—” she has to think about it “—Kristin?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m mostly busy.”

He’s been mostly busy with things he hopes his mother has never heard of. You know what, maybe she’s just never heard of sex. Or she had it once for him and once for Joan and called it a day.

“That’s a long time to be busy,” she says softly. She doesn’t look at him. She uses the flat blade of the knife to scoop the tomatoes into the bowl.

“Yeah, well.” He rips the lettuce into smaller pieces. “There’s always this summer.”

Carefully, she sets down the knife. She touches one finger to the edge. It’s sharp, she’s going to cut herself. But she doesn’t. She just says, “I worry about you,” in the way that means _Once I figure this out, you’re never hearing the end of it_ in Mom.

“I’m fine,” he says, and really, almost means it.

The summer passes. He gets back and skates. They’ve turned some kind of a corner. There are a bunch of new guys, a new coach, a new conference. They won’t have to spend half the year flying back and forth across the continent. Pretty soon they’re going to have a new arena. It feels good, like they’re clicking together on the ice. There’s this new Russian guy who plays on the second pairing and basically never lets anyone score. Eric knows how to say hello by now, even if Vitya still laughs at his accent. The guy doesn’t laugh at his accent. He just smiles and says, “Privet,” back before switching to English.

They’ve found something. They win. They win more than half the time, even. They lose three in a row right at the beginning of the season and then don’t lose three in a row again. Vitya invites Eric back to New Year’s. It’s probably a mistake because while none of them puke on the ice, they do lose to the Capitals, which is an objectively embarrassing thing to do. Tommy almost cries about it afterwards. But whatever, Eric’s happy. They’re winning.

They glide into the playoffs. They win, and they win, and then, the finals so close Eric can taste them, they lose.

It’s okay, though. Once the bad part passes, it’s been a good year. He’d written it this time, when Pez handed him the paper. He knew what was coming.

—

He’s twenty-three and he tells his agent he’ll take it: a six-year contract with a hometown discount for a no-move clause. All of a sudden he’s making most of two million dollars, with the promise of more later. He calls Wardo. “What do you do with this?” he asks.

There’s a baby crying in the background. “What do you do with what?” Wardo says, followed by, “Shh, shh, I know.”

“What do you do with money?” He doesn’t know. His parents didn’t have much, and what they did have, they spent on him and Joan. It’s not like they took vacations or anything.

“Don’t have kids,” Wardo says. “It sounds like a good idea, like you’re passing on your genes and that’s good for the world, but they never sleep.”

“Nobody thinks passing on your genes is good for the world,” says Eric, and hangs up. He can ask Tommy instead.

Tommy is, unsurprisingly, worse help. “I dunno, I just mostly forget I have it and sometimes I buy, like, the nice whisky.”

“You hate whisky,” says Eric. Tommy is currently drinking a wine cooler.

“You should talk to that lawyer guy,” says Tommy. “He’d know.”

Every part of Eric’s body goes cold, like he just got thrown out of a space ship. People explode or something in space. It feels like that could happen. “What lawyer guy?” he says.

Tommy takes another sip of his drink. “Wardo’s friend. From university. Came to your birthday.”

The soles of his feet are cold. Is that normal? It’s July, that doesn’t seem normal.

“Huh,” he says. He pauses long enough for it to sound real, then says, “Oh! Sam?”

“Oh, Sam.” Which Tommy didn’t have to say like that.

“Yeah,” says Eric, “maybe I’ll get his number from Wardo sometime.”

“I have his number,” Tommy says, and gets up, like he’s planning to—and _wait just a goddamn minute._

“Why do you have his number?” Eric can’t decide whether he’s more confused or mad. He figures he’ll let Tommy’s answer decide for him.

Tommy is rummaging through one of the drawers next to the kitchen sink. “Wardo left it with me. He thought you might— Whatever, man, he just left it.” He comes up with an actual scrap of paper that looks like it used to be part of an envelope. It has S on it, and a series of digits.

“In case I need a lawyer.”

Tommy runs a hand through his hair and doesn’t make eye contact. “Yeah, in case you— Yeah.” He looks like this conversation is causing him physical pain, which, good.

“Okay,” says Eric. He pockets the piece of paper. It would be weird not to take it now. Weirder.

“Okay,” says Tommy, and then, “Hey, I know we don’t—”

“Is there baseball on?” Eric says. He hates baseball. They just stand there on the field and occasionally move like three steps. Plus, the Blue Jays practically just won the World Series twice in two years and the Leafs haven’t been in the same building as the Stanley Cup since 1967. So, like, fuck them on principle.

Tommy has the nerve to look offended. “It’s November, dude.”

“Well, let’s see what’s on, then,” says Eric, and grabs the remote to turn on Tommy’s monstrosity of a TV. Tommy had had to hire people to hang it on the wall. Then he had invited everyone over to look at it, like it wasn’t just the same as his old TV except flatter. Eric’s never been more grateful for a stupid waste of money.

“You could get a decent haircut,” says Tommy, sounding relieved, “since you’re so rich now,” and they don’t knock the TV off the wall fighting about it, but maybe they do knock a little bit of a dent in beside it. It’s small. You could cover it with a picture, or a poster or an album cover.

“Stop destroying my house, you fucking animal,” Tommy says, but he bro-hugs Eric before Eric leaves, so Eric guesses he’s not too pissed off.

Later, he reaches into his pocket and finds the piece of paper. He’s not going to call. Obviously, he’s not going to call. But he should put it someplace safe anyway, because it was nice in the backwards way Tommy is nice for Tommy to give it to him. He has a small wood box that he got as a souvenir from someplace. He doesn’t remember where. He puts buttons in it sometimes when they fall off, but always forgets to give them to the dry cleaners. When he opens it, the buttons rattle. He tucks the paper in and closes the lid.

The lid stays closed. Eric's team is winning. They’re winning a lot more than they’re losing. Eric’s leading defensemen in points and keeping his penalty minutes within a range his coach doesn’t rant about. What more can you do? They close out December on a six-game win streak.

People keep talking about the end of the year as if everything is going to flip over to 2000 and then computers are going to go crazy and eat themselves like that snake that eats its tail. Pez thinks it’s all bullshit. The rookies keep saying they’re buying extra canned goods, like they’d know what to do with a can of food. Netter hits the side of his stall with a water bottle and yells, “If you wanted to fix computers, you should have picked a different fucking career,” and the room mostly settles.

“Is bullshit,” Pez says again, with authority. His whole country’s system of government collapsed ten years ago and he’s still here playing hockey, so Eric goes with his assessment.

New Year’s is subdued this year, because they’re playing New Year’s Day. Just in Buffalo, but still. They drink a few glasses of champagne and eat too much. Vitya tries to teach Eric how to say millennium in Russian, but there are too many sounds to press out from behind his top teeth. Eric burns his wish: _a good year._ Why stop now? The years have been pretty good so far.

By the time he goes home, he’s mostly sober. People thought the phones might stop working, but he picks up the phone and there’s still a dial tone on the other end. He should call someone, to make sure it goes through. There’s a number in the box. He opens it and digs it out from under the buttons. He dials. It rings once before he comes to his senses and hangs up. Who calls someone at 2 am unless it’s an emergency? It’s not an emergency.

He puts the number back in the box. For emergencies.

—

He’s not sure, looking back, exactly how it starts. A few Ericas on the ice. Some extra language for the refs to ignore. He shrugs it off. It only works if they see it working. They’ll get over it soon enough.

But it doesn’t go away.

He’s twenty-four and sixteen again and seven again, kicking at the inside of the locker, screaming. The other guys mostly laugh it off. They get in a few extra fights for him. They don’t bring it home.

It spreads. He tries dating a few new women. He stops finding—look, it’s not like he _needs_ to sleep with men. Women are fine. They’re soft and they smell good. He talks about them more in the dressing room, and feels shitty about it. “Get some,” says one of the rookies. Eric was definitely better behaved as a rookie than any of the new kids they’ve brought in since he got there.

“Are you kids-these-days-ing me?” Tommy asks when Eric says it out loud.

“No,” says Eric, who absolutely is.

At the end of the season, he answers the same exit questions.

“Any issues we should know about?” asks the GM.

“Nope,” says Eric. He’s not a problem. He’s not going to be a— _problem._

At camp, at the end of the summer, one of the kids who’s going to spend most of his year on the Marlies says, “That’s Erica,” to another kid Eric’s never seen before in his life. Eric spins around and skates back towards them.

“What’s that?” Eric says. He is very calm.

The second kid looks worried. Good. The first one has more balls than brains. “That’s what they call you,” he says, “‘cause you’re a—”

The kid is sprawled on the ice. Eric has the idea that he put him there, but he can’t remember it, exactly. His knuckles should hurt. When he’s done this before, his knuckles have hurt. There is a loud sound, and someone’s grabbing him, and someone’s saying, “Jesus, McNally, what the fuck,” and Coach is yelling at him and the second kid looks like he’s about to throw up.

Coach doesn’t stop yelling at him until they’re both off the ice and in the tunnel, where he seems to run out of steam. “He’d better have insulted your dead mother, McNally,” Coach says.

What’s Eric going to say to that? “My mom’s alive,” is the first thing that comes to mind.

“He’s on your team. He’s an idiot. The rookies are all idiots. _You_ were an idiot. You don’t—”

“He—” Eric starts, but he can't continue. What's he going to say. _He was going to call me a name._ Big fucking deal. He’s been called so much worse, by so many worse people. By coaches, on TV. He doesn’t know why this one got under his skin. Because it’s team. Because team is supposed to— “I won’t do it again,” he mumbles.

“Good, Jesus,” says Coach. He takes his cap off and puts it back on again. “You’re done for today. You’re out tomorrow. Personal reasons.”

“But—” says Eric, as Coach says, powering over him, “You pull this kind of shit again and I’ll sit you until you don’t remember the last time you touched a stick.”

“Fine.” You can’t really leave a conversation decisively while you’re wearing skates on dry land, but Eric does his best.

He goes home. Who knows? Tommy, and Wardo. Did Tommy tell someone? That would be the sort of dumb stuff he’s always doing, going out for drinks with a guy on the Sens or something and spilling his guts in the back of a cab. Why did Eric think he could trust people with this? Just because they hadn’t fucked him over yet? He stews in it through his first beer and half of his second. Tommy’s an asshole. He had always known, but he had forgotten, or Tommy got good at pretending. Maybe he’s told half the League. Maybe there’s some player sitting in Montreal right now telling all his buddies and the next time they play the Habs it’s going to be wall-to-wall, and the next time, and every time he gets on the ice people are going to be laughing at him, and all it takes is one guy who thinks it’s not funny, who thinks Eric looked at him too long or the wrong way, who maybe sees him down and accidents happen, right, it’s a fast-paced game.

Three beers in, it occurs to him he could ask Tommy. He gets as far as the phone. He picks it up. There’s a tone on the other end, and then he’s been holding it long enough that it turns into alternating beeps. He puts the phone back down. It rings immediately. He lets it go: six long rings, and then Tommy’s talking on the answering machine, saying he’s sorry, saying it wasn’t him. It should be more of a relief, but all Eric feels is numb. Does it matter how people know? They know. They think they know.

Eric thinks about the number in the box. He drains the beer.

The box is warm in his hands, like the wood soaked up all the warmth inside the apartment. The piece of paper inside has gotten folded on one corner. He doesn’t think about it too much. He picks up the phone again.

Someone answers on the third ring.

“Is this—” Eric coughs, tries again. “Is this Sam?”

“This is he,” says Sam, and Eric almost laughs, the echoes of his mom’s phone coaching bouncing back at him. “Who’s this?”

“It’s Eric,” says Eric. He wishes he’d grabbed another beer for this conversation.

Sam is silent on the other end of the line. “I don’t know an Eric,” he says finally.

“Eric McNally.” Eric is going to come out of his skin if he has to sit here on the phone explaining who he is.

“The hockey player?”

Eric wants to say, _Yes, the hockey player._ Instead, he says, “We met a few years ago.”

Sam chuckles. Even over the phone, Eric can imagine what his eyes look like, wrinkled at the corners. “It was your birthday.”

“Yeah,” says Eric, “it was my birthday.” He can't figure out what to say next.

“What can I do for you, Eric?” Sam says. He sounds businesslike. There’s a rustling sound in the background and then a thunk like a door closing.

That’s the question, isn’t it? Eric scrambles for a reason to have called. “I, uh, I might need a lawyer.” He winces.

“Oh?” Sam’s voice loses its warmth. Eric’s talked to him for a minute and he already wants nothing more than to bring that smiling voice back.

“Nothing bad. Nothing— I just—” He can’t do this over the phone. “Could we, like, meet somewhere?” That’s a thing people do with lawyers.

Sam hesitates. Eric isn’t sure what it means. He hates not being able to see people’s faces. Then Sam says, “Sure,” and gives Eric an address, an office number, and a time that afternoon before saying, “I’ve gotta go, I—”

“Sure,” says Eric. “I’ll see you soon.”

He dithers for a minute before getting out a suit. Lawyers wear suits. He’s going to see a lawyer, he should wear a suit. He doesn’t wear his favorite tie, but he doesn’t wear his least-favorite. The secretary looks bored to see him when he gets to Sam’s office building, but finally waves him in with a, “Mr. McNally, after me.” He can’t remember the last time someone called him Mr. McNally. Never.

Sam shakes his hand when they see each other. Eric doesn’t know what he expected from a lawyer’s office, but probably a place substantially bigger than a desk. Sam’s office is larger than a desk by about half a meter in every direction. There aren’t any windows. A giant map of Canada, yellowed with age at the edges and carefully framed, takes up almost all of one of the walls. A giant bookcase, stuffed with books, takes up almost all of the opposite one.

“I thought you were a lawyer,” is the first thing out of Eric’s mouth.

Sam’s eyebrow twitches. He sits down behind his desk. “I am a lawyer.”

The room doesn’t seem any less like a prison on second look. Eric hums and sits on one of the two chairs facing the desk. He puts his hands in his lap. Sam is looking at him without saying anything, which—aren’t lawyers supposed to talk a lot? The lawyers on TV talk a lot. The wall behind Sam has framed things on it, diplomas and pictures of Sam shaking hands with people. Eric wants to know who is in the pictures.

“Why are you here, Eric?” Sam asks. He’s not mean about it, but he doesn’t sound happy either.

“I— Okay, you know how I’m—”

Sam snorts, which okay, the last time they saw each other they made out against a public sink, and that wasn’t Eric’s smoothest moment, but he’s not in here giving Sam shit about it.

Eric keeps going, though, because he’s not a quitter. “Do people, you know, know? About you?”

Sam shrugs. “Some do. I don’t announce it. I don’t hide it. It doesn’t come up in conversation that much once you hit your late twenties and everyone’s married.” Gently, he says, “It’s easier for me, in a lot of ways. I don’t have to deal with—well. If people have a problem with me, I just don’t take them on as clients.”

“Yeah,” says Eric. That makes sense. He rubs his palms on the tops of his thighs. He wishes he’d bought a coffee on the way so he’d have something to do with his hands. But he didn’t. He’s just here. As-is. “I just— I think someone knows. I think, maybe a lot of people know. Or there’s rumors, I don’t know.” He can’t look at Sam’s face.

“Well,” says Sam, “are you always as subtle as you were with me?” Eric’s head snaps up. He wants to be mad, but Sam looks so startled that the words came out of his mouth that he can’t keep a hold on anger.

“Little harsh, man,” says Eric, and Sam says, still wide-eyed, “Fuck, I’m sorry, that was totally unprofessional,” and Eric can’t help it, he doubles over laughing.

Sam laughs too, cautiously. The tension seeps out of the room.

“Yeah,” says Eric, “I’m subtler than I was with you,” and he tells Sam about his few good years.

When he’s done, Sam leans back in his chair. “I’m still not sure what you want me to do here.”

Eric only knows the sketchy shape of it himself. “I want to not be traded to the fucking Lightning because I’m a problem for the room. I don’t want—I can’t stop people from knowing, but I’m not good at—could I call you? For like, advice?” He scours his brain for anything he’s heard about how lawyers operate, and adds, “I’ll pay, obviously. Sort of like, a—whatever, like a client.”

Sam purses his lips. “You’re describing a client,” he says. “That’s literally exactly what a client is.”

“Yeah, so a client. What’s your rate?”

He doesn’t yelp when Sam tells him. It turns out that this is what people use their money for.

—

Sam meets with the brass, and the brass meet with Eric, and when Sam finds out about the second meeting he yells for a while and goes back to meet with them again. “You don’t meet them without me,” he says to Eric. Eric grimaces. That’s exactly the sort of thing a problem for the room says, that he’s not going to meet management without his lawyer present. When he tries telling Sam that, Sam just growls, “If you’re going to meet them without me, find yourself another lawyer.” It’s probably a bluff, but Eric isn’t going to call it.

And it’s not as bad as it could be. Maybe he doesn’t get invited as much to stuff. Maybe Tommy stops leaning into him when they wait for their turn at practice. Maybe the Russian lessons trail off. A few of the boys give him a lot of space in the showers, like he might suddenly snap and tackle one of them. Like he doesn’t know each disgusting one of them by scent alone. He runs them harder in practice, maybe, finishes checks he might have pulled. They stop fighting the guys who fuck with him, and his penalty minutes tick up. Coach doesn’t say anything about it. Eric gets into it with a player in Long Island who lays him out like swatting a fly. He’s day-to-day until the world stops spinning and the swelling goes down enough for the dentist to look at him. Sam calls after that one and says, “You could fight smaller people,” like Eric hasn’t thought of that before.

“Thanks, Sam,” Eric says. He’s still a little mushmouthed from the combination of missing teeth and painkillers. _Fanksh._

“As your lawyer,” Sam starts, but Eric says, “Fuck off,” before he finishes the sentence. Sam laughs. Eric likes making him laugh. He likes the way it makes Sam’s sharp face soften. Sam doesn’t laugh often. Mostly he smiles in tiny movements, drawing his mouth into a curve you could miss if you weren’t watching. When he laughs, you feel like you’ve earned it.

“I’m not looking at you until you have new teeth,” says Sam, and then Eric is swearing at a dial tone.

That night, he thinks about it. Was Sam looking at him when he had teeth, before? Sam is always paying attention. He pays more attention to things than anyone Eric’s ever met. He notices the way people sit, and whether they have droplets of coffee on their tie, and whether they’re left-handed or right-handed, and how often they check their watch. He notices all of it in meetings and tells Eric about it later, and what it means. It’s staggering, because as far as Eric can tell what happens in meetings is that you try not to fall asleep and sometimes don’t succeed.

But what does Sam notice about Eric? That he kind of rushes shaving in the mornings and nicks himself more often than not. That he broke his pinky in juniors and now it doesn’t bend quite right. That he doesn’t check his watch because he usually forgets to wear one.

Does it mean something to Sam, put together like that? Maybe people are just written in a language Sam can read. Like the way Eric can glance up the ice and see where everyone’s going to be in one second, in three seconds, and pass the puck tape to tape just before he gets crunched into the boards. He doesn’t think he could always do that, but he doesn’t remember not being able to.

Anyway, Sam looks at Eric when Eric has teeth, maybe. That’s— Eric lets the thought settle. There's no point thinking about it. They keep grinding forward. A game at a time.

—

Tommy knocks into him after practice one day. Eric startles. It’s been—he doesn’t want to think about how long it’s been. No one touches him anymore, except to celebrate. Even then, it's all business. They don’t call him anything, not the team, but they don’t have to. If they could trade him, they would. If they could afford to sit him, they would. They can’t. He scores more than any other two D-men. He has more points than four of the bottom-six forwards. He’s a problem, but not so much of a problem that they aren’t going to play him.

So when Tommy touches him, Eric flinches away. He tries to hide it but he’s not wearing his pads and they’ve been partners for five years. Tommy can tell where Eric is on the ice without even looking. Eric knows where Tommy’s going to be half a minute before he gets there. A dozen times when Eric’s called Tommy’s place it’s gone straight to the machine because Tommy’s busy trying to call him. No way Tommy doesn’t notice. He doesn’t mention it, though.

“You headed home?” says Tommy.

“Yeah,” says Eric. His heart beats in his throat. They’re alone. Tommy could be stalling him here, could be waiting for— But it’s _Tommy,_ he wouldn’t—

“Hey.” Tommy’s looking at him, close, the way you look at long words written in tiny print. “I’m not gonna bite, man.”

Eric forces the panic down and digs up a smile. “Yeah, guess I was just thinking.”

He waits for Tommy’s joke, a riff on having just gotten his brain scrambled not too long ago. Instead, Tommy says, “You want to go get a drink?”

Eric doesn’t trust his voice. He nods. They wind up at a place Tommy knows. The bartender smiles at them when they walk in, and Tommy waves at her. Eric’s never been here before. Tommy’s taste runs to places where you feel like you shouldn’t touch anything in case you leave fingerprints on the polished surfaces or places where if you stand still too long you get stuck to the floor. This isn’t either. It’s dark inside, lit with a few lamps and some neon signs. There’s a mirror behind the bar. The bartender is pretty in the way that bartenders are pretty, but not so pretty that they hired her only for that.

“Hey, Tommy,” she says when he and Eric sit at the bar.

“Hey, Kat,” says Tommy. “Can we get two Steam Whistles? And, like, whatever is fried.”

She eyes Eric, but seems to decide he’s acceptable. She tosses down coasters, sets beers on them, and disappears back through a swinging door.

Eric doesn’t know what to do with his face. He wants to ask Tommy why they’re here. He wants to ask Tommy why they haven’t had a conversation outside of practice in three weeks. He kind of wants to tell Tommy about Sam, about the way Sam pays attention. When he looks up, Tommy’s looking back at him in the mirror.

“I like Toronto,” Tommy says, looking around the bar. “I have a life here.”

“Okay?” Eric says.

Tommy takes a big breath. He presses his lips together. “They’re shopping me,” he says finally. “My agent says a couple of different places.”

Eric feels it like a cracked rib, a sudden, dull pain. “They’re trading you.”

“Nothing’s sure yet, but yeah, we need forward depth, we’ve got plenty of D, they’ll just move—”

“Shit, man,” says Eric. “ _Shit._ ” 

“Yeah,” says Tommy. They tip their bottles back, parallel images in the mirror. “I just didn’t want it to be a surprise for you if I'm not—if I end up somewhere else.” Tommy bites his lip. “I know it’s been kind of a shit year. I know there’s been some stuff—but I just want you to— _fuck,_ dude.” He starts shredding a corner of his coaster, his mouth twisted miserably.

Eric should say something. He can’t think of what to say. “I’ll miss you,” he says. He means it. He looks over at Tommy. Tommy’s maybe a little watery around the eyes. He wouldn't admit it under torture. “Hey,” adds Eric, because when you spend five years together, you bleed into each other, “don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”

Tommy shoves him hard enough that Eric has to grab the bar not to fall off his stool. “I’m not gonna die, you sentimental asshole.”

“I dunno, they could trade you to Philly—”

“That whole team of fucking goons—”

“You’d fit right in—”

“They’ve got the wrong half of this pair—”

Tommy’s climbing down from his stool, so Eric tips back the last few swallows of his beer and is swiveling to face him when Kat arrives with a basket of round brown things. “Deep fried roulette,” she says, dropping it on the bar. “You break another piece of my furniture, Tommy, and you’re fucking banned.”

“Jesus,” says Tommy, “Okay, fine,” and hops back up to try what she brought. He visibly burns his fingers on it but puts it in his mouth anyway. “Ow, ow, ow,” he says once he swallows, sucking air.

Eric looks at him. Tommy’s such a fucking idiot. “You’re such fucking idiot,” Eric says affectionately. He grabs a cylinder out of the basket and bites in tentatively. The inside is cheese, squishing out from around the hard batter. Okay, yeah. He can work with that.

He kicks a foot out until it finds a rung on Tommy’s chair. Tommy kicks a foot back into him. It’s now or never. “I called Wardo’s lawyer friend.”

“Yeah?” says Tommy, careful.

“I hired him. He’s my lawyer now.”

Tommy’s eyes do something Eric has never seen them do before. His whole face turns red. Tommy’s going to flip out. Tommy’s going to break shit and get them banned from this very medium-nice bar where he knows the bartenders. Eric grins and waits for it.

—

Tommy goes to the Sharks just before the deadline in exchange for a third-line center, a solid forward prospect, and a couple of low draft picks. The Leafs are busy meandering through the second half of the year. Win a couple, lose one, win a couple, lose one. They dribble into the playoffs and sweep the Sens, only to lose to fucking Jersey, so obviously that could’ve gone better.

Eric’s done with hockey in May, again. He doesn’t go home this time. Instead, he sits in his apartment. He flips the TV on, flips it back off again. His skin itches, like he’s got sand down his shirt somehow. The organization wants to get rid of him, of course, loosen up the room. Could get a good price for him if he’d waive his no-move. He doesn’t want that. He wants to live here. Sam talks to Eric’s agent and one of them talks to the GM and that’s the end of the rumblings.

In a couple of months, he’s going to have to drag himself back to camp. He’s going to have to learn a new D-partner’s weird tics. He’s going to have to listen to stupid shit from the rookies and too-long or too-short pauses from everyone else.

This is supposed to be fun. It had been fun—he searches back—at some point. At some point, he’d loved racing backwards toward his own net, swinging his stick through the passing lanes. At some point, he’d loved getting run hard into the boards, the way it knocked all the bones in his body a little looser. He’d loved a good, clean, shoulder-to-shoulder open-ice hit, where all you could do was get low and brace for it.

It’s not love, now. It’s— He's good at it. One of the best. He plays hockey.

He gets through the summer, training, sleeping. On the first day of camp, someone flies an airplane into the World Trade Center. Twenty minutes later, there’s another one. Half an hour after that, another one. Camp is cancelled until they aren't grounded. He goes to his parents’ house and they sit silently in the living room and watch the news. He can’t stop imagining it, the people inside the buildings. The people on the ground, in suits and pencil skirts, covered in dust. The people in the planes, calling the people they loved to say goodbye. Tiny figures, falling through the air. Everything he does seems so small. The world pulls in. He wants his family. He wants the people who love him.

Vitya’s there, when camp’s back on, in the stall next to him. They shuffled assignments around this year, put Eric on one end. Everyone’s quieter than usual. Vitya hasn’t talked to him in—he can’t remember the last time.

They waddle out for the Blue & White game, balancing on the blades of their skates. Some kid shoves a piece of paper in Eric’s face. He swats it out of the way. He just wants to play.

When the hit comes, it’s almost a relief.

—

There are people talking to him.

Someone says, “Eric,” urgently, like Eric’s supposed to be doing something he’s not doing.

He can’t move his head. Should he be able to move his head?

He should be able to move his head.

Someone has a hand on his chest. He’s cold.

Vitya’s face swims over him. “Hey, don't move,” Vitya says. He looks worried. He doesn’t need to worry. Eric wished for a good year, sitting by himself in his apartment.

He closes his eyes.

—

A doctor shows him x-rays and explains the way his shoulder broke, explains the surgery, explains the recovery.

Six weeks of rest, then PT for months. Definitely no season.

Probably, the doctor says very gently, the way you tell someone their loved one has died, no more seasons.

“Okay,” says Eric. He would shrug, but. The inside of him feels like someone stuffed it with cotton. Like he’s on display at a museum, with wire holding his skin in an animal-shape.

—

His mom is there, with calm eyes and warm hands, after he gets home. He's loopy and out of his head on the painkillers. She keeps making him soup, like she doesn’t know what else to do. He keeps eating it.

Tommy calls and helps by talking loudly enough that Eric can hear him without having to hold the phone.

Wardo calls and says Eric can come visit whenever, they have fried ravioli in St. Louis and it’s incredible, and that the kids haven’t seen Eric in forever and are starting to forget his face.

Vitya shows up and sits with him, on a chair in his bedroom. Eric’s surprised by that. He didn’t think they were those kinds of friends. He didn’t think they were friends at all, anymore. Vitya tries to teach Eric some kind of card game that mostly involves telling Eric he’s stupid. Eric can’t hold cards, so Vitya can see everything he’s going to do before he does it. It’s the most fun Eric’s had in a while. They yell at each other so much his mom comes in to check on them.

Later, when Eric is tired and trying to pretend he’s not, Vitya puts his elbows on his knees and lets his hands dangle between his legs. He keeps his eyes on the floor. “When I’m little,” he says, softly, “there’s a man, he lives with another man he says is—not like brother, like—” He waves a hand.

“Cousin?” says Eric.

“Cousin,” says Vitya. “Mama, she is saying, ‘We don’t talk about this, it's not right.’ They are not real family.” Vitya picks up his head. He looks at Eric, and his throat works. “They—make family. It's not easy, they do anyway.”

“Okay,” says Eric. His shoulder hurts. His eyes hurt.

Vitya blinks a few times and scrubs hands over his face. “For a long time, I’m thinking it's not right, like Mama says. But now I don’t know. Here it’s different ideas. Maybe they make family because of love. Maybe it’s okay.”

Eric is thinking a lot of things, his brain flitting through them so quickly he can’t pin one thought down. How it’s not just love. How it’s the way his insides fit together. How he could never love anyone and still want this, still need in a way he’ll never be able to explain. How much it means to have his friend here, his friend who is trying to undo the same kind of tangled knot that Eric carries in his chest.

He feels the heat of his wish, singeing his fingertips.

“I wished for a good year,” Eric says, picking at the blanket. “That first New Year’s. That was what I wished for.”

“You get it?” Vitya is very quiet now. His eyes are red, but he doesn’t look away.

“Yeah,” says Eric. “I got it.”

—

Eric thought he was done fighting, but it turns out he was just done punching, which isn’t the same thing. Sam and Eric’s agent spend more time together than Eric has ever spent with either one of them, squeezing his contract out of the organization. As it drags into October, into November, Sam starts to look bruised by it. His little smiles disappear. Eric makes dumb faces or pretends not to be able to read to bring them back.

“You don’t have to act like you’re not smart,” says Sam when Eric asks him to define terms.

“What if I just really don’t understand why anyone would use ‘inasmuch’ so many times?”

Sam pinches the bridge of his nose. “No one understands that.”

Eric wants to put his fingers on Sam’s face. He wants to move them in little circles over Sam’s forehead and watch the lines smooth out, and he wants to follow them with his mouth, and look, even he knows these are not normal thoughts to have about your lawyer. Instead, he says, “Once we’re done with all this, can I take you somewhere?”

Sam frowns. “Like, out to lunch?”

Eric didn’t know where he was going with it when he asked, but now he does. “To Kingston.”

“To—”

“Kingston, yeah.” He knows what he wants.

“That’s two hours away.” Sam looks confused, and a little concerned, but he’s not saying no.

“You’re busy getting me enough money to live on for years. I’ll pay you your hourly rate. I’ll drive.”

“You can’t drive for that long.” Sam is looking at Eric’s shoulder, which had started being subjected to more focused PT two weeks ago and complains about it by sending occasional shooting pain up the side of Eric’s neck.

Eric fiddles with a pen on Sam’s desk. It looks expensive, and it’s heavier than Eric’s expecting. Sam’s eyes follow Eric’s hands. The cap of the pen won’t come off. “You have to twist it,” says Sam. Eric keeps expecting Sam to take it away from him, to tell Eric he’ll break it, but he just watches Eric’s hands and doesn’t say anything. The cap unscrews. Inside is a nib, glossy with ink at the tip. Eric fumbles getting the cap back on and draws a line across his fingers. His arms still don’t always know how to work together.

“I can drive for that long,” says Eric.

“No you can’t,” says Sam. He holds his hand out for the pen.

“Maybe by the time everything’s sorted out here, I’ll be able to.” Eric has his teeth in it now. When he was a kid, his class read this book where someone captured a raccoon by putting something it wanted in a bottle with a narrow neck. It stuck its hand in and grabbed the thing in its fist. Then, once it had closed its fist, it wouldn’t let go. It couldn’t get its arm back out. Eric hadn’t understood wanting what was inside the bottle bad enough not to let go. Just let go. You could get a new scrap of meat or whatever somewhere else. But what if you didn’t have to? What if the thing wanted to be in your hands? What if it came out on its own?

“I’ll drive,” says Sam. “We’ll get it sorted out, and I’ll drive. I’m not dying in a car crash with you because you try to take a road trip with a messed-up shoulder.”

“Okay,” says Eric, letting go.

“Okay,” says Sam. His lips turn up at one corner. “What’s in Kingston?”

“Water, mostly.” Eric is watching Sam’s mouth. He wants Sam’s mouth to keep turning up at the corners.

“Fine.” Sam unscrews the cap of the pen, screws it back on. The divot between his eyebrows deepens, then eases. “Kingston. Don’t tell me why.”

Eric puts his feet up on Sam’s desk. “Put your fucking feet down,” says Sam, but he’s smiling. Eric smiles back.

Eric’s not smiling later, as he grunts his way through PT, or as he drags himself back into his apartment. He could get a bigger place. He’s just never…bothered. He stands in the entryway in his boots. He could buy a house, a nice one. With a whole room for books or, like, old maps or weird rocks. A big garage. He could learn how to build things. Bookshelves. For the books. He could refinish old doors or stain old end tables. He could be the kind of guy who knows things about different kinds of woodgrain.

He’s never had to think about it before—about the things regular people do to fill their lives. Suddenly, it feels suffocating. He’s going to live another fifty years, maybe. Another sixty.

What the fuck is he going to _do?_

He hasn’t taken his boots off. He turns around and walks back downstairs.

At his parents’ house, he stands on the porch, the key in his hand. His mom comes out the door, canvas bags slung over her shoulder. She pulls up short when she sees him. “Eric,” she says, then, worried, “Eric?”

“Hey,” he says hoarsely. His throat isn’t working right. His breath keeps getting stuck right behind his tongue. He should sit down.

“Come inside,” she says. “I’ll make you something hot to drink.”

He perches on a chair at the kitchen counter and watches his mom make tea. He’s seen it hundreds of times. Thousands. She puts the kettle on and pulls the box down from the cabinet, with two mugs. She pours the water. She sets a mug down in front of him and sits next to him with hers.

He takes a sip. It’s hot and bitter. Next to him, his mom traces her fingers over the curve of the handle. Down, and up.

“I think the contract stuff is all going to come out okay,” he says, rubbing at the line of ink from Sam’s pen. It won’t come off. He feels like his ribs are going to explode, like something is trying to push out from inside them.

“That’s good,” says his mom. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“I haven’t dated anyone in a while,” he hears himself say. “I haven’t—I’m not going to, I think. Date.” He takes a breath, and adds, “Women.”

“All right,” she says. She lays a hand on the back of his neck and threads her fingers into his hair. His head is on the counter, resting on his good arm. He doesn’t remember putting it there.

“Mom,” he starts, but he doesn’t know where to go next. He needs her to say something.

“Do you remember once, when you were little, maybe twelve, you came home from practice and said you thought you were getting sick?”

He nods. He remembers. He remembers that kid looking up at him from the floor, and how mostly what he had felt was relief. If they had someone else, they weren’t looking for him.

“I got in a huge fight with your father that night. I wanted to pull you out. But he said we should let you come to us and decide, and then you were already being scouted, and it just sort of—kept on that way. You seemed happy.” Her voice strains, but she keeps going: “I don’t think I’ll ever stop wondering if that was the wrong choice.”

His eyes closed, Eric shakes his head. “It wasn’t the wrong choice. I wanted it.” He had wanted it so badly. He had wanted to hold a Cup over his head and scream joy at the sky. He couldn’t be both.

Her fingers rub gently against his scalp. His whole body relaxes into it, being loved.

By the time he leaves, he feels wrung-out, the way he feels after a good skate. His mom hugs him by the door, careful with his shoulder. She puts a hand on his face. “Come for dinner sometimes.”

He can’t pull it together enough to respond to that. His chest hurts. He nods at her. “Yeah, ma,” he manages.

At home, he kicks his boots at the rack and hangs up his coat. He’s got fifty years. Maybe sixty.

—

They get to a deal the week before Christmas. Sam calls Eric to tell him. “Merry Christmas,” says Eric.

Sam pauses. “I—ah. Don’t celebrate,” he says.

“So you’re not doing anything tomorrow,” says Eric.

“Actually,” says Sam, “my schedule for tomorrow is booked. I have other clients.” He’s always so fucking snippy when he thinks Eric is assuming things about him. Eric can’t get enough of it.

“What about New Year’s? You doing anything New Year’s Eve?” Eric is already planning it: leave early because of the traffic, be sure to get there before noon.

“I have friends,” says Sam, which means Eric’s won.

“I’ll pick you up at 8 am,” says Eric, and hangs up over Sam’s, “Why the hell do we have—” It’s going to be a great time.

He leaves his apartment by 7:30 to make it to Sam’s by 8 with time to get coffee. “I didn’t know how you like it,” Eric says, pointing at the packets of sugar, of whitener. Sam grabs the cup out of Eric’s hand and drinks it black, which answers a question Eric didn’t know he wanted answered.

“Get out of the car, I’m driving,” Sam says like he's not interested in Eric arguing with him, which maybe answers another question Eric didn’t know to ask.

They drive for a long time in silence. Sam is a careful driver. He sticks to the speed limit. He checks his mirrors and uses his signals. Both of his hands stay on the wheel. Eric tips his head back on the seat. The car rocks. Sam breathes steadily, his face calm. Eric’s just going to close his eyes for a minute.

He wakes up with a start, his mouth dry. “You’ve gotta tell me where we’re going,” Sam says. Eric gives him the directions. They drive through Kingston and into the parking lot for the fort.

“A fort,” says Sam. He looks dubious.

“It’s historical,” says Eric. “You like old things.” He tugs his gloves on and flips up his hood. After some consideration, he adds sunglasses.

Sam makes an unimpressed face. “Very anonymous.”

Eric ignores him. He doesn’t want to sign a bunch of autographs and answer questions about his shoulder. He wants to go to the fort. They pay and walk inside. He’d thought there would be more people here, in this period between Christmas and New Year’s when everyone’s desperate to get their relatives out of the house. But there are just a few other small groups, looking at the walls.

They wander. Eric feels every breath of cold air like a knife. Sam spends forever examining the plaques. His eyes are so bright. “This is interesting,” he says. “It says here that they kept political prisoners in the fort during World War I. Did you know that?”

Eric knows it, because he’s standing next to Sam and reading the same plaque. “No,” he says. “That is interesting.”

“Huh.” Another part of the fort catches Sam’s attention. “Oh, wow.” Eric holds his breath. Sam is walking towards the passageway to the upper fort. His body is loose. He doesn’t care who sees him standing here, staring open-mouthed at an ancient building. “Do you see those doors?” says Sam.

Eric trails him. Sam stops in the arched doorway, craning his neck to look at the doors. “They’d keep anything safe,” he says with wonder in his voice, and Eric is saying, “You’re fired, okay, I’m firing you,” and Sam is saying, “Wait, what?” and Eric has arms around him, his face in the stupid fake fur lining Sam’s hood.

Sam laughs a little, and his arms come up around Eric’s back and his hands don’t stop moving, running up and down beside Eric’s spine. “You wanna ask me something?”

“Hey,” says Eric. He can’t wipe the grin off his face. “It’s my birthday.”

Sam bumps a hip into him. “It is _not_ your birthday.”

“You wait ten minutes and they’re going to shoot the cannons for me. For my birthday.”

Sam’s laughing for real now, but he follows Eric up to watch the uniformed soldiers load the cannons, light them, fire. When Eric sneaks a look at him, his eyes are closed and his face looks peaceful. Of course he’d look peaceful in the middle of artillery fire.

They’re shivering by the time they get back to the car. Once they’re inside, Eric kind of wants to climb in the backseat and drag Sam in after him. Instead, he keeps himself tightly contained. He played his hand. Whatever’s next is up to Sam. Sam, who is driving his same careful way, who is heading onto the 401, who is signaling his lane changes, who is flushed in a way Eric thought was from the cold but has persisted for half an hour inside the car and persists as Sam twists his face up, looks over at Eric, and takes an exit. It persists as Sam pulls into a hotel parking lot, and as he goes in to get a room, and as he takes Eric in a side entrance and up.

“Yeah?” Sam says once they’re inside. Eric shucks his coat, steps out of his boots. He doesn’t know what he wants to do first, but he knows he wants to do it, wants to see what makes Sam come apart.

“Yeah,” says Eric, kissing him. It’s been—he can’t count the months. He could if he stopped, but what a waste of time that would be. Does it matter? He’s doing it now.

Sam is smiling into the kiss. He gets a hand into Eric’s hair and pulls. Eric runs fingers over Sam’s face, down the back of his neck, into the stretchy collar of his shirt, tugging at it. He wants the shirt off. He wants skin, the big open stretch of it to explore with his hands and his mouth. “Okay, okay, settle down,” Sam is saying, laughing, stripping his shirt off, getting his hands under Eric’s.

“ _You_ settle down,” says Eric, which makes Sam step back to raise an eyebrow. Eric’s whole body follows him, and okay, that proves Sam’s point, but this isn’t about _winning,_ or if it is, maybe it’s about both of them winning. Eric finds Sam’s belt buckle, yanking him forward. They stumble together.

“You fall over and mess up your shoulder again—” Sam says. He steers them towards the bed, fishing Eric’s arms out of his shirt. “Lie down.” He’s so fucking bossy. Eric loves it. He lifts to let Sam pull his jeans off, and then he’s lying there naked. He kicks his knees out. Sam’s eyes go unfocused, and he watches his hand as it travels up from Eric’s kneecap like he’s trying to figure out how he got here. Like maybe he’s not sure what to do next. Eric hitches his hips to give him some ideas.

“Hey,” says Eric, “you good?”

“Yeah,” says Sam, but he sounds far away.

Eric sits up. Sam’s not looking at him. “Hey,” he says again. “We don’t have to—” It’s okay. It’ll be okay. If Sam changes his mind, if he says he’s not interested, they’ll get back in the car and drive back to Toronto. They don’t have to see each other anymore. Eric can go back to—what? Nothing. He can’t think about it. He’s not sure if Sam wants to be touched, but when Eric holds out a hand, Sam takes it.

“I’m gonna learn how to build bookshelves,” Eric says. He’s out of breath, and they haven’t even done anything, haven’t even—

Sam’s eyes dart over to his face. “You read?”

Eric bristles; he _could._ But he doesn’t want to get sidetracked. “I might start. Or someone else might want them.” He closes his eyes in case Sam is pulling away, in case he’s going to get off the bed and pull his shirt back on and apologize with his warm, sympathetic face. Sam tugs his hand out of Eric’s and that’s it. He’s going to go. Eric can feel it sitting on his chest like a boulder. But then Sam's hand is there again, light fingers dipping into the hollow of Eric’s throat, trailing down to circle a nipple. Eric tries to keep still, but he can’t stop the shudder that goes through him. He opens his eyes.

Sam is frowning, which isn’t great, but is still touching him, which is. He scratches his fingers through the hair below Eric’s belly button. “You’ve—this isn't your—”

Is that what this is? Eric doesn’t roll his eyes, but it's a close thing. “I have not been sitting home alone in Toronto, pining for the guy who kissed me one time.”

Sam’s revenge for that is a tight grip, which is way more than Eric usually starts with, but okay, he can—he tips his head back, chasing the contact when Sam moves away. Sam’s gone for as long as it takes to wriggle out of his pants, and then he’s back, straddling Eric’s lap. “I didn’t think that. I know it’s just—I know it’s been hard.”

“You want me to run down the list of guys I’ve slept with?” Eric feels raw about it, like Sam thinks maybe this isn’t real. Like Sam thinks this is pity, or making up for something. Some kind of apology.

“No, that’s not—” Sam looks frustrated now. “I’m trying to do the right thing here.”

Oh. Oh. "You're good," says Eric. "You're good, it's—" He doesn't know the words to make Sam understand what's happening in his body, the way he's hungry, the way he's always been maybe a little hungry. He tries to say it with his face instead.

Whatever his face is doing must mean something good to Sam, who is always paying attention, because he relaxes. Eric runs his hand down Sam’s side, digging his fingers in above the hip to watch Sam squirm where he’s ticklish. “Stop it,” Sam says, slapping Eric’s hand away. He smirks in a way that Eric can’t wait to see again, that Eric can’t wait to see a hundred more times.

“You wanna make me?” Eric says. It could be a line, but it’s not.

Sam’s eyes go dark. He gets a hand back between them, just the right side of painful. “I could probably distract you.” It’s dry, rough, on the edge of uncomfortable until Sam spits in his hand and keeps going. Eric doesn’t have a good response for that, but he makes a noise, or a noise happens that he’s pretty sure came from him, and Sam has that smirk back on.

“Fuck off,” says Eric, getting his good arm up to pull Sam down on top of him. He wants to kiss him more. He wants Sam’s body weighing him down into the mattress.

They move together for a while, making out. There’s no hurry. They’ll get there. Eric pulls his core tight and tips Sam over onto his side, then shimmies down the bed until he can slide his nose along the crease at the top of Sam’s thigh, where he’s a little sweaty and has short, coarse hair that Eric wants to get his face into. Eric leans over the side of the mattress, sorting through the pile of clothes until he finds his pants, with the condoms he’d stowed, hopefully, in the back pocket. He wants Sam in his mouth, he wants—he _wants,_ and he _can_ want, and he can _keep wanting._

He can do what he wants. He does.

Sam tries to be polite, but it unravels quickly, his hands grabbing fistfuls of Eric’s hair and yanking. Eric grins and gets back to work, Sam shaking underneath him, Sam saying, “Fuck, _fuck,_ ” Sam coming undone.

They lie there for a minute afterwards. Eric kisses the inside of Sam’s thigh, where the muscles are still twitching. He’s pretty proud of himself. He wants more, but not urgently. He could wait if Sam’s not up for it right now.

“Get up here,” says Sam, pulling at his shoulder, and they’re kissing again. The latex taste in Eric’s mouth fades. He nudges against Sam’s belly experimentally, and Sam says, “If you insist,” in the way that makes his eyes sparkle. His hand finds its way back down. Eric wants to keep his eyes open, but he keeps losing time. After a bit, Sam says, “You have another one of those?” and Eric goes rooting for his pants again. Sam kneels between Eric’s legs. His hands don’t stop moving, scratching gently against the thin skin, stroking along the tops of Eric's thighs. Every hair on Eric’s body feels like it’s plugged into an electrical outlet. How could he have thought he was taking Sam apart? Obviously, it’s the other way around. He takes it. He lets his body do what it wants. He lets go.

—

They nap, jumbled up, halfheartedly under the blanket. When they wake up, sticky, they frown at each other until Eric says, “Shower?” It turns out to be a good idea, because a shower is a great place for kissing and for getting a handful of soap suds and rutting together, lazily, soaking in it.

They order pizza and eat it sitting in bed, licking the grease off their fingers. It’s dark outside, and Eric can’t see far when he peeks out the window, like the night is making a bubble around them. They watch TV, switching aimlessly between broadcasts. People are celebrating the new year in Newfoundland, and pretty soon they’ll be celebrating here, too. It's not quite—Eric sits up. “I’ve gotta—I’ll be right back,” he says. Sam, half-asleep, just nods at him.

Eric puts on enough clothes not to scandalize anyone and walks down to the hotel bar. It’s empty, tiny candles in glass cups flickering on the tables, the bartender reading a book. “Hey,” Eric says. “Could I get a bottle of champagne to take up to my room?”

The bartender looks like he’s going to say no, but then just shrugs and charges Eric for it. He goes back to reading his book. On the way out, Eric hesitates. He glances back at the bartender, who doesn't notice, and swipes one of the burning candles.

By the time he gets back up to the room, there are a few minutes left until midnight. Sam’s sitting up in bed, in a nest of pillows. He looks curiously at the candle. Eric’s hands shake a little as he uncorks the champagne and pours it into two of the room’s little plastic cups. Whatever, it’s not—he’s fine.

“Aren’t you supposed to wait for midnight?” Sam says.

“No,” says Eric. He grabs a pad of paper from the side table and rips two small pieces. He hands one to Sam. “You have to write a wish.”

“A wish?” Sam smiles, like he’s not taking it seriously.

Eric needs him to take it seriously. “A wish. For the new year.” He scribbles his own on the paper and offers the pen to Sam. On the TV, the clock has started to count down from 30.

“Okay,” says Sam. He’s still smiling, but he writes something on his paper.

On the TV, people are chanting. Five seconds, four.

“Now, you burn it,” says Eric.

They've gotten to the end of the countdown. Eric sets his paper on fire, waiting until it’s almost ash and then dropping it in his champagne. Sam looks intent now. He burns his paper and drops it in his cup.

Eric tips his head back and drains the champagne in two long sips. The bubbles scrape his throat. Sam’s mouth hangs open. “This is gross, just so you know,” he says. He does it anyway. He swallows his wish.

Eric stares at him. There are fireworks happening on the screen. There are muffled sounds outside, too, distant booming, like cannon fire. Eric feels the burn of the champagne, warm, warm all the way down.

**Author's Note:**

> I watched the movie again after I'd finished the first draft and saw that Eric was apparently born in 1969 and played for the Oilers for four years before playing for the Leafs, according to the profile the kid is holding at the beginning. Welp! If someone else wants to write the even worse experience of being a closeted gay NHL player in Edmonton, the kind of place where people stop you in the grocery to offer unsolicited feedback on your neutral zone defense and the fact that your team just traded Wayne Gretzky, and the crushing disappointment of winning the Stanley Cup your rookie year in a series you were probably healthy-scratched from only to never have a shot at it again, I would read it.
> 
> The Fort Henry National Historic Site _is_ actually very interesting, but is _not_ actually open in the winter. Just in case you're planning a vacation on the basis of having read this story (not advised).
> 
> Speaking of, I have been to Toronto one (1) time, so sorry to lifers, especially Leafs fans born after 1967.
> 
> The Leafs team in this story is invented with some vague references to/mashups of real players. The Russian timeline is a little anachronistic, with an anthem that wasn’t re-adopted until 2000, and probably more players in the League than there were at the time. The seasons and most team details are not invented. Hope springs eternal. The players would have still had road roommates since this was before that revision to the CBA, but I decided to ignore that. Leafs camp was indeed scheduled to start on September 11, 2001 (it was held in St. John's that year), and was delayed for obvious reasons, not least of which was that the arena was being used to house stranded passengers.
> 
> Toronto might not be where I'm from, but this fic is. Any and all feedback welcome.


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